El Sistema – the answer to all our music education problems? No.
Back to the world of music education for a post (at last – I hear some of you say), it was great to read Tom’s article on The Guardian blog today. I have no particular strong views about the work of El Sistema and related projects in the United Kingdom. But what really annoys me is when people who ought to know better (in this case Richard Holloway) make overly positive comments about their own work whilst misrepresenting the quality of music education everywhere else. This misrepresentation of so much good quality music education around the United Kingdom within our schools and music services on this Radio 4 programme was shocking. It leads me to agree with Tom that whilst Richard Holloway is a powerful advocate of El Sistema …
… he could be even more effective in his advocacy of music education in general if he understood the work that has been happening in Scotland and the rest of Britain for decades – so much of it unheralded, unpromoted, unpublicised – and if he put his weight behind promoting the whole sector, not just one tiny part of it.
I’ve commented on this subject in many blogs. El Sistema is yet another in a long line of socialist plans that may work well in an oppressed place like Venezuela but should not be the ‘main’ source of music education in a capitalist society. If music educators had any guts, stones, or balls, they would create and market ways to get their product out to the world…and technology lends itself to this perfectly. Instead, we tend to grovel for scraps and often simply ‘give’ our product away for free. Let’s start training music educators to be entrepreneurs and thereby ‘save the music’ responsibly. Sure, we may lose half a generation of kids, but if we do it right we can create a healthy and active group of music enthusiasts with the capital to make for a stronger future full of consumers and enthusiasts of all ages. We may also just save the profession as well.
eugene cantera
22 Jun 10 at 8:28 pm
Thanks for your comment. I agree with many of your points. In fact, last Friday we had the final session for this year’s students on our PGCE course at Manchester Metropolitan University. I made a similar point to yours about the need to be entrepreneurial in this current climate. One size fits all approaches to music education will not work in the future; nor will transplanting approaches from other cultural contexts (obviously there may be some quick wins on that front but these will not be sustainable in this financial climate – as many have pointed out). The privatisation of the educational system in the UK will require music educators and their current groupings to do some pretty nifty lateral thinking if they are going to survive (in schools, local authorities or anywhere else for that matter!
Jonathan
23 Jun 10 at 7:40 am
I don’t think it’s impossible to replicate at least some of the impact of El Sistema over here, so long as the focus is upon personal growth, and not the cultural missionary position we’ve seen in ‘Orchestra United’ on Channel 4.
I blogged about this recently (http://davidpricesblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-not-to-capture-learning.html) when I found myself, bizarrely, in complete agreement with A.A. Gill.
We’ll get a sense going forward whether these copycat initiatives are trying to musically educate, or develop the young person. The English pilots now seem like a hugely expensive, yet limited, experiment and almost had lack of sustainability built in from the off.
David Price
4 Aug 10 at 10:35 am